Cancer

Hello, and welcome to the #bioscinews round-up! This is the place where you can find all the important biosci new stories from the past week, in a short, digestible paragraph.

This week’s news

Amphibians around the world have been fighting against fungal infection for years, but a new multi-pronged approach may be the key to getting rid of this disease. Chytrid is a white fungus, which kills amphibians and presents a big problem for frog populations world-wide. In the successful approach to eradicating this infection, scientists disinfected the environment and treated tadpoles of the Mallorcan midwife toad over a period of seven years. Extension of this approach may be crucial for saving frogs in different habitats around the world.

Antibiotic resistance is a huge issue for modern medicine. This week, news emerged that bacteria in China have developed resistance to the final group of antibiotics used when all else fails. This is particularly concerning as these traits are easily transferred between bacteria, meaning we have no more “last line of defence” against bacterial infections. This is a big blow to modern medicine – but all is not lost. Scientists are constantly developing new types of antibiotics and hopefully we can continue bringing these to clinical standards!

Animal models are important in studies involving human health, and the zebrafish might be helping to clear up the trade-off between tissue regeneration and cancer. Many animals can regenerate tissues and limbs if they are injured or removed, but this capability is severely limited in humans, with only very mild regeneration possible in very specific cases (e.g. the liver). By introducing a human tumour-suppressor gene into zebrafish, scientists were able to repress the regenerative capabilities of the fish. This supports the idea that humans have reduced their regenerative abilities as a trade-off for being more resistant to cancer development. This information could be useful in the treatment of cancer and in assisting healing and possibly even regeneration of serious injuries.

Hello, and welcome to the #bioscinews round-up! This is the place where you can find all the important biosci new stories from the past week, in a short, digestible paragraph.

This week’s news

Farmers living near big cats may not need to worry about loss of livestock, so long as the local ecosystem is balanced. Wild big cats seem to prefer wild animals to farm animals, and will only hunt the latter if food is otherwise in short supply.

Researchers have been trialling the use of antibodies to treat Alzheimer’s in humans, but recent studies in mice question whether this is a feasible treatment. The author’s found that the antibodies break up the amyloid-beta plaques, the protein build-up that causes Alzheimer’s, but the release of this protein can over-stimulate neurons until they die.

Nanoparticles hold some hope for cancer treatments in the future, especially for individually tailored treatments, but these can be difficult and expensive to produce. Algae can be genetically modified to produce nanoparticles, and this can help reduce the production cost for potential future cancer treatments.